How could this not be hurting my brain?

I am released from the bonds of flesh and rise to contemplate the cosmos from the vantage of a phantasm. From this angle, living and dead mingle indistinguishably in a vast network of information, every being but a node, transmitting data with material and spiritual connotations.

Distinctions, such as the notion of sentience, are an illusion, I can clearly see, a matter of perspective, a quality we assess by comparing with ourselves. There is nothing which does not possess it; it is a feature of the Whole and not of the parts, which, experiencing it, assume it to be their province alone.

The same is true of Life: every atom, every photon is charged with the Spirit. Star and crystal and tree and amoeba-every one thinks of itself as “me” and lives in a world inhabited by its own kind and lesser beings.

The Universe is the body and brain of God. Einstein was on a fool’s errand, seeking to understand the thoughts of God through physics. What he should have expected to find were the bodily functions and neurochemistry of the Deity.

Eternally exhausting the realm of infinite possibilities. Every piece in it’s place. Hologrammatic images cast in a fractal pattern. Like the hippie said, one person in a mirror funhouse.

What I think of as “me” is nothing more than one of these circuits, I realize. If “I” malfunction, the data will be rerouted along another path, one which will emerge naturally as a consequence of my passing, which will then be “me.”

This is nothing to fear.

“I” am hardly unfamiliar with this egoless state; the transformation is common behind the screen of several different drugs, even during sex and writing. Yet always it fades, and the grasping demon of desire reasserts its dominance in the physical realm, bringing a paradox: who experienced ego dissolution?

And of course that is the villain, lust: for food, for sex, for social intangibles, for our own bodies; Siddhartha called it out of the lineup over three thousand years ago, suggesting its complete obliteration and creating another of the paradoxes of which he was so fond, for how can anything be accomplished without the accompanying ambition to make it so, even when the goal is abolishing yearning itself?

If a tree falls in the forest, the other trees will hear.

And then I am beyond thought, beyond perception; I am a soap bubble carried on the waveform of the Universal Mind. “Time” is a silly memory, a game I once played to organize events. There is only Here, Now.

Somewhere a phone rings.

At first I think it a twisting of the music, a response to the new status of stasis; but the video-game sound effect I chose to signal incoming calls gets louder, until I think my head will split; I fumble the phone free of my jacket pocket with numb hands, and, in a process that seems to take forever, I press the Enter key and bring the phone apprehensively to my cheek.

“Hu-Hello.” My voice sounds alien, unfamiliar.

“Victor, it’s Llewellyn. Just got your message. What’s up?”

Up. A preposition. Refers to the gravity-induced delusion that an object may be higher than another. “I’m-I’m a little…stuck.”

Fortunately, she’s hip enough to know what I mean by this lingo.

“Killing the pain. Bad news at the doctor’s, huh?” she says, sympathetic but not surprised. “I’m coming right over.”

“No…” I protest weakly. “I won’t be able to answer the door.”

She laughs, a creepy sound when amplified by K-echo. “You forgot to lock it. I’ll let myself in.”

I don’t ask her how she knows this. “Come ahead, then.”

“Okay. See you soon.” She clicks off, to my immense relief.

Telephones and Ketamine definitely do not mix.

Be nice to see Llewellyn, though. Or, rather, six of her, with my K skip-vision in full force. I jack the volume on the remote control and return to Never-Never land, the timeless, spaceless void, with a downward flick of my eyelids.